‘White Workers’ Freedom Needs Negro Rights’ by William L. Patterson from Labor Defender. Vol. 9 No. 4. April, 1933.

Scottsboro Boys Are Not Alone

March 25th marks the end of the second year of the Scottsboro case. The innocence of the nine Negro boys was never so clear. And yet at this moment the struggle around their defense is sharper than ever. Why?

Ruby Bates, Alabama’s star witness, gives the clearest evidence showing that the case is a frame-up in a letter to her sweetheart: “Those policemen made me tell a lie, those Negroes didn’t touch me or the white boys.”

The attorney general of Alabama, who must, according to law, consider the defendants innocent until their guilt is proven, just brushes this evidence aside. The girl was drunk when she wrote it, he says. “The n***s got a fair trial the first time. They’ll get the same in Decatur,” is the opinion of another prominent Alabama citizen. Alabama is prepared to go through with the legal lynching of the boys and ready to use the rope if necessary.

The Scottsboro boys are not on trial. And it is not only the lynch system of the state of Alabama that is on trial. Alabama cannot be separated from the rest of the United States. It was forced back into the Union by the victorious industrialists of the North after the Civil War. Alabama, like all the other Southern states accepted the Federal Constitution in 1865. This was the basis and the price upon which they were permitted to come back into the Union. But the Constitution had been revised since the beginning of the Civil War. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments had been added. These amendments supposedly brought democratic rights to the Negro masses-the guarantee of full equality for: Negroes, the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, if they were qualified, etc.

The government at Washington, we are told, holds the states responsible for carrying out the Constitution. Therefore, it is the whole system of government, with its Constitution that promises, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that is on trial.

If those who rule in Alabama can deny Negroes the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution of the United States, Alabama’s ruling class stands above the Constitution–or else the Constitution was never meant to apply to the people of an oppressed nation. There are poor whites in Alabama who are not much better off than the toiling Negro masses. Who guarantees their rights? No one but themselves. They are not the ruling class of Alabama. They themselves are oppressed by the ruling class. And yet they are asked to help murder and oppress Negroes because the rulers tell them, “white supremacy must be maintained.”

At the same time the ruling class asks Negroes to act as strike breakers to smash the struggle of these poor whites when they fight for better living conditions. Nowhere in the country are the living conditions of the white workers and poor farmers worse than in Alabama. And their position is growing more desperate every day. Still, they cannot yet recognize the fact that the struggle for the rights of the Negro masses is a struggle for all those who are oppressed regardless of race, creed or color.

The Jackson County “Sentinel” brags about past lynchings and hints about those that are to come. “AFTER WE FORGET ‘THE ROPE’ TO PICK UP ‘THE CODE’ FOR THE SAFETY AND BENEFIT OF THE NEGROES WE ARE TOLD THAT WE MUST HAVE NEGRO JURORS ON ANY JURY TRYING THE BLACKS IF THEY ARE TO GET ‘THEIR RIGHTS.’ A NEGRO JUROR WOULD BE A CURIOSITY IN JACKSON COUNTY– AND SOME CURIOSITIES ARE EMBALMED, YOU KNOW.”

On the one hand, one hand, the rulers of Alabama cry, “The boys will get a fair trial.” and on the other they threaten to murder other Negroes who ask only for their democratic rights–to serve on the jury, etc. They can only create some faith in this talk about fair play in one way, and that is by GRANTING THESE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS. Alabama’s bosses are denying the poor whites the right to live. Many of them, by poll taxes and other requirements, are not even allowed to vote. Thousands of their children get hardly any education. For all these wrongs they are told the Negro is to blame, and many of them cannot free themselves from these ideas taught them by their own ruling class. They allowed themselves to be bribed by the barest economic and political privileges in the name of “white supremacy.” Today, in this moment of crisis even most of these have been taken from them. Almost all that is left to them is the right to help lynch Negroes. And as the possibility for giving these poor whites economic and political privileges grow less and less, the ruling class will call on them even more strongly to help in lynchings, will provoke them still further into hatred of the Negro.

Divide and Rule–an old policy–always becomes clearer in such times of crisis as we are living through today, when the ruling class has hardly any other bribes to offer–bribes that could hide their class character behind some lying phrases.

The Scottsboro defense struggle, the struggles of the black share-croppers, have proved that the Negro of the South is the only real ally that the poor white workers and farmers have. Scottsboro, the symbol of the oppression of the Negro masses, has become a symbol of the oppression of the American working class.

Forward to a complete victory!

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n04-apr-1933-lab-def.pdf